When it comes to art museums in the Northeast, precious few can compete with the Yale University Art Gallery. It's not just the depth of its collection — more than 200,000 objects — but its breadth. Yale's holdings comprise art from the Neolithic period to today. Its collection of Greek and Italian vases alone numbers 1,000 objects and it houses the finest assemblage of ancient glass in the world.

Yale's problem, if it could be considered such, was an embarrassment of riches. It wasn't necessarily that it hadn't enough space, though it was partly that, but that the space it had was divvied up in such a haphazard, warren-like fashion. Fourteen years ago, when it began what would be a $135 million expansion and renovation, its goal was not so much to enlarge, but to arrange. The gallery needed to redistribute its wealth.

And redistribute it has, in a spectacularly fluent renovation that has left the gallery blindingly brilliant where it needs to be, sympathetically somber where it is called for and exhilaratingly open where it needs to breathe.

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